Privacy-Preserving Cloud-Based Firewall for IaaS-based Enterprise
Hualong Sheng, Lingbo Wei, Chi Zhang, Xia Zhang · 2016
Firewall is the critical first line of defense against cyber attacks. In order to improve security and performance, modern enterprises have to deploy and manage their own firewalls. But the firewall infrastructure is expensive and complex to manage, thus enterprises begin to outsource their firewalls to the cloud to reduce firewall management and deployment costs. The current firewall outsourcing schemes require enterprises to fully trust the cloud. However, firewall policies are confidential information of enterprises, and enterprises do not want to reveal them to the cloud. Such privacy issues hinder the adoption of cloud-based firewall service. With the development of cloud computing, more and more enterprises migrate their IT systems to the cloud (we call these enterprises the IaaS-based enterprises). In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving firewall outsourcing scheme for a new architecture, in which an IaaS-based enterprise outsources its firewall policies to another cloud. We implement a prototype of our scheme and the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and performance of our scheme.